The NFRs

If you’ve ever checked out my last.fm profile, you may have noticed several tracks showing up with me as the author, yet not published for release on this site. There are generally two reasons for this. One is that the track in question may be an in-progress prototype that I imported to listen to outside of the DAW environment – as I find that just listening, without the immediate ability to reach out and tweak things, often allows me to focus more on the underlying sound and determine how it can be improved.

The other, somewhat more depressing reason is that some of the tracks are either unauthorized remixes, or contain samples from, other people’s music – and while the internet itself has a very strong remix culture, copyright law sadly does not conform to this. I would certainly like to see every purchased track of commercial music come with the right to remix or sample it for personal or noncommercial use, but that is not the current state of the law.

As a result, there are several of my projects that I cannot fully release, but I would still like to mention them here, and at least provide some small audio samples to give an idea of how they sound (which I believe is legitimate under fair use). Additionally, out of an abundance of caution, these samples are loaded with a different player and are not available for download.

And so, without further ado…

The NFRs (Not For Release)

Sample Test

This is a track that I created to play with variations of sound and rhythm based off of a particular sample. That sample, however, was taken directly from Daft Punk’s “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.” As a result, the full track can’t be released, as it features the sample across the first minute or so before fully diverging. I created an edited version of the track that completely excises the part with the sample, which you can listen to below, but it unfortunately is a bit lacking with the intro’s removal.

These were a couple of experimental tracks using a pseudo-random algorithm to scrub through the sound of the title theme and full audio track, respectively, of the movie “Gone in 60 Seconds,” creating a truly strange sequence of out-of-context vocal clips. However, as it’s basically a transformation of a copyrighted source, it is not suitable for full release, although you can hear a short sample clip below to see what it sounds like.

Quite a ways back, before the era of portable MP3 players, the main method of playing music for my brother and I were large boomboxes capable of playing CD audio. However, this was the early days of MP3s, and being the techie in the house, I had the only computer with an actual CD burner. As a result, when my brother wanted to have something new to listen to, he would come to me with a Zip disk (an ancient, higher-capacity derivative of floppies) full of music files to be burned to an audio CD.

However, just burning the CDs from the playlist seemed, welll… boring, and so I decided to spice the CDs up with some various tracks of my own. One of the most infamous of those permutations was when I found a clip of someone screaming “Satan” (I believe from an Orbital track), and thought back to the controversies in the days of vinyl where people claimed they could hear satanic lyrics when playing certain records backwards. So, naturally, I decided to splice the audio clip into other clips of various songs that were popular at the time at appropriate points in the lyrics. The resulting parody was a hit in my household, at least, and while it might qualify as parody under fair use, because of its heavy use of commercial samples it has not been released further.

Resampled

This track was another “bonus” CD track for my brother, but it consists mainly of sequenced loops from various online sample sites. It also, however, contains a commercial sample of “Heart to Heart” by I believe Blumchen and “For an Angel” by Paul van Dyk, and as I have no attribution info even on the free loops, it can’t be released.

UpperLands

This is a strange transformation of a video game remix of the “Upper Lands” theme from Secret of Mana (i.e. Seiken Densetsu 2), using granular synthesis for some very unusual ambient effects. However, because of the source material, it can’t be released.

The NSFA,E (Not Safe for Anyone, Ever) Album

This album is a series of transformations involving erotic source material, including obscure found sound, random audio pulled from tube sites, and even a sound recording of the vocalizations from my own sexual response, heavily processed with granular synthesis, time-stretching, distortion, modulation, and other techniques, along with several custom Reaktor ambient noise-generator patches, to turn the source material into strange, haunting, and generally unsettling “illbient” soundscapes. The songs are so heavily transformative that the source material is essentially unrecognizable – however, because the source material is likely to be copyrighted (and, I suppose, for reasons of general decency), this album will not be generally released.

The included tracks:

1. Aahn

2. Snog Nog (3rd Rev)

3. Pleasure and Pain

4. Subject and Object in Space

(and yes, the title of the fourth track is an incredibly thinly-veiled reference to the final episode of Firefly.)

The DEK Remixes

While I was doing my radio show, and occasionally afterwards, I created various mashups, remixes, radio and other edits of various tracks. You can find a list, and some samples, below.

T.M. Revolution – Hot Limits (DEK MidiMix Remaster)

Hot Limits is one of my favorite songs from the Japanese pop singer Takanori Nishikawa, who performs as T.M. Revolution (although, in fact, my introduction to said music was even stranger – my first exposure to it was of the bizarrely incomprehensible English translation/cover of the song by the italian band John Desire, made “famous” by the infamous and by now mostly-forgotten fanimutation We Drink Ritalin). I found a decent MIDI transcription of the song a while back, and recently uncovered it, but thought it sounded… not so good being played through General MIDI. I decided to import all of the MIDI tracks into my DAW, modify them a bit (for instance, to recreate the modified opening of the song from a live performance they did), and assign them all-new sounds and backing drums.

However, as this is a cover of a commercial track and as I do not know the provenance of the MIDI file, I can’t release this track or make any real claim to any of it as my own (aside from the sound remastering). If you’d like to at least hear a little of what it sounds like, though, there’s a small sample clip below.

This was a promo sequence I created to advertise the electronic music genre on KZSC Santa Cruz, the radio station where I hosted my electronic music show “Life to a Beat.” In addition to the title theme from my radio show, it also included clips from several popular electronic music artists, from Kraftwerk to Ian Pooley.

Bad Feeling (Extended)

A slight redo of the classic Marathon parody involving “Jingle Bells” being sung via the death screams of B.O.B.s. Extended by me with several seconds of actual audio-recorded original gameplay aboard the U.E.S.C. Marathon.

All the Eastern Girls with You and Me (Mashup Remixes)

An attempt to cram two tracks (Chapel Club – All the Eastern Girls (Breton Remix) and Christian B – You and Me) together, with additional effects processing to create something that lies somewhere between indescribable and unlistenable.

This is what happens when you take the audio from several different live recordings of Underworld’s Scribble, attempt to sync up their start times as closely as possible, and then listen to what happens as they inevitably begin to diverge into a cacophony of beats, weird doppler-shift sounds and reverberating lyrics.

Dilemn – Pitiless (DEK chopf**ka remix)

I’m not generally a fan of dubstep, but something about this particular track works for me. I first heard it in Saints Row 3, I believe, and acquired a version of it soon afterwards. Because of how cleanly it’s structured, it’s quite easy to chop it up and rearrange it in a variety of interesting ways, and to add some additional sounds on top of it to make it even crazier.

Slyder – Neo (The One) (DEK GTA3 Radio Edit)

I took this track and went crazy with the compression on it until it sounded like its counterpart straight off of Rise FM in GTA3, which was easily my favorite track in the entire game (well, excluding chatterbox, at least).

The SimCity 2000 Soundtrack Remaster (Dave’s MIDI Urban Resample Kit)

A project I did to recover the original MIDI files from an ancient copy of Sim City 2000 and remaster them using an up-to-date General Midi sound bank (specifically the Gold Base soundbank for Harmony Assistant), creating an MP3 album of the classic soundtrack from the game I quite possibly played the most growing up during the advent of the personal computer. I would love to see this released someday, but somehow I doubt EA/Maxis would be particularly eager for that. At least thanks to GoG I can actually play Sim City 2000 again…

Underworld – Two Months Off (DEK Radio Edit)

I edited the vocal part of the track because I wanted to play it on the radio, and wasn’t sure whether one of the words was too “dirty” for my afternoon radio slot. That being said, I think I actually prefer this particular edit to the original, and I tend to listen to it quite a bit more than I ever did the original track.

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Welcome! DigInt is a site/netlabel that primarily features the music of David Kibrick. This is the third iteration of the site, featuring keyword search, a category hierarchy for albums and music types, and a full tag system. Celebrating 17 years of freely available, independent music!

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